EMOCRACY 



VS. 



SOVEREIGNTY 



BY 



DARWIN P. KINGSLEY 




This Address is issued for the use of the High Schools of the 
United States. It is distributed by the Chamber of Commerce 
of the State of New York in the hope that the subject matter 
thereof may prove useful to the Debating Societies connected 
with such Schools 



DEMOCRACY vs. SOVEREIGNTY 



AN AFTER DINNER RESPONSE 



DELIVERED NOVEMBER 18, 1915, AT THE 
147th ANNUAL BANQUET 

OF THE 

CHAMBER OF COMMERCE 

OF THE 

STATE OF NEW YORK 



BY 

MR. DARWIN P. KINGSLEY 



WALDORF-ASTORIA, NEW YORK 



^ 






I^ traHEffeT' 



DEKOCEACY vs. SOVEREIGNTY 



Into the terror and chaos which to-day misrule 
the greater part of the world certain questions are 
increasingly thrusting themselves: 

lst^_^,-What was the fundamental error, in the 
civilization of the world on August 1, 1914? 

2d. What fundamental change must be made 
in order to correct that errorf 

Of written and spoken answers to the first ques- 
tion there is no end. Answers to the second question 
are naturally fewer, because the facts necessary to 
coherent thinking cannot be arrived at until the first 
question has been answered. 

All the peoples of all the warring countries be- 
lieve their cause is just, that they are fighting defen- 
sively for their existence. And the paradox of it is 
that all these beliefs are true. They are all fighting 
for existence and for fatherland. 

I heard Dr. Bernhard Dernburg say in the early 
days of the conflict, defending Germany for her in- 
vasion of Belgium, that the act was a necessity, that 
a nation could not be expected to consent to its own 
destruction. 

Commenting on our last and formal protest to Great 
Britain, against what we deem her violation of Inter- 
national law, and her disregard of the rights of neutrals, 
one of the great London dailies, justifying England's 
determination to retain control of the seas at all 
hazards, said ''A nation cannot be expected to commit 
suicide." 

These expressions from either side, almost identical 
in phraseology and absolutely identical in philosophy, 



reflect the existence of a cause of war not often referred 
to, under the compulsion of which however the whole 
world rests to-day. 

The flames which burst into a world conflagra- 
tion fifteen months ago were not only already burning 
under cover fiercely everywhere in Europe, but un- 
questionably were hghted, unquenchably lighted when 
world civiUzation based on the doctrine of sovereignty 
began to take form centuries ago. 

The civihzation of 1914 rested on that doctrine. 
And what is sovereignty? Sovereignty is final authori- 
ty, the thing greater than the law, that indeed protects 
the law. Sovereignty is the highest expression of 
authority in a civilized state, not inferior however 
to the authority of any other sovereignty, be that 
sovereignty physically greater or smaller, and not 
qualified in its completeness by any other power. 

This is the language of sheer authority, and sov- 
ereignty is the doctrine of authority. Democracy can 
no more live in its atmosphere than Jefferson's theory 
of inaUenable rights can five in a world ruled by 42-cen- 
timetre guns and superdreadnoughts. Its demands are 
such that peace is now only a period of preparation for 
war. If any branch of human endeavor is anywhere 
developed along purely commercial fines, it is almost 
certain ultimately to be held an error. Highways 
should be built for mifitary purposes; railroads should 
primarily be planned to transport armies; ships of com- 
merce should be so constructed that they can be con- 
verted quickly into cruisers or transports. In obedience 
to the demands of sovereignty, the shadow of war rests 
over us at all times. 

At the very outset sovereignty assumes that it 
must ultimately fight, that war is its true explana- 
tion, and, therefore, it reserves the right to take the 
last dollar of its citizens or subjects, and, if necessary, 

4 



to demand the sacrifice of their fives as weU. The 
favorite phrase of sovereignty runs this wise: ''In 
defense of our fiberties and our soil we will fight to 
the last man." 

Whatever the form of government, the senti- 
ment is the same. Behind that sentiment and in 
obedience to its necessities the prejudices, the pro- 
vincialisms, the misconceptions, the hates, the fears, 
and the ambitions that so bitterly divide nations, 
were born. On the first of August, 1914, they had 
grown to uncontrollable proportions. 

Add to these conditions the fact that we were 
living in the age of electricity, when the impal- 
pable and imponderable ether had become not a dead 
wall but a shining highway through infinite space, 
when the spoken word was seized by a messenger 
whose speed and orbit far outreached the imagination 
of the people who kept and guarded for uncounted 
centuries that glorious word picture finally expressed 
in the first chapter of Genesis, and the conclusion is 
inevitable, — in such an age, and in a world so small a 
civilization based on eight great aggressive unyielding 
unconditioned sovereignties was no more possible w ith- 
out war than that two solid bodies should occupy the 
same space at the same time under the laws of physics. 

Unconditioned sovereignty was the fundamental 
error in the civilization of 1914. 

A striking feature of this war is that its divisions do 
not follow the usual lines of cleavage. Neither race nor 
color nor rehgion are primarily responsible for the con- 
ditions in Europe, nor for the cataclysm which has 
occurred. Christians are fighting Christians; Jews 
are kiUing Jews; Moslems are against Moslems; 
whites are murdering whites; men of color are 
fighting their kind. Saxons are fighting their own 
breed; Slavs are against Slavs. The special favor of 

5 



the God of the Christians is blasphemously claimed by 
both sides. 

The ordinary causes of war had unquestion- 
ably decreased on August 1, 1914, but the hope which 
that fact held out to many of us proved finally to be 
a false hope. In the impact of unyielding sov- 
ereignties, in the fear which created a race in arma- 
ments, in the belief that national preservation was the 
supreme duty and sovereignty the supreme good, 
there was abundant fuel for the fires already lighted. 
The conflagration was certain. Every new invention 
by which time and space were annihilated, presumably 
bringing humanity increased comfort and safety and 
happiness and efficienc}^, served even more markedly 
to increase international friction. Sovereignties were 
jammed together; they met everywhere; they jostled 
each other on every sea ; they crowded each other even 
in desert places. They had no law by which they could 
live together. They could have none. Each was 
itself the law. When, therefore, through the elimina- 
tion of individual prejudices and provincialisms on 
the one hand, and the conquest of time and distance 
on the other, the world had reached a point 
where human brotherhood was conceivably attain- 
able, humanity found itself in the clutch of this 
monster called sovereignty. Then came the tragedy! 
Not alone in squandered life and property, but in 
missing the great moment prepared through centuries 
of human fidelity and suffering, the moment when 
humanity was prepared to see itself through eyes suf- 
fused with sympathy and understanding rather than 
as now through eyes blinded by hate and blood-lust. 

The people of the various great powers of the 
world in 1914 in fundamentals were not dissimilar. 
Never in the story of man's evolution had he been 
so nearly homogeneous. Everywhere he had ap- 

6 



proached common standards. His dress was much 
the same over most of the Christian world, and 
this uniformity had even made headway against 
the ancient prejudices of the Orient. He thought 
much the same everywhere. His standards of justice 
were strikingly alike. He was kindly and merciful. 
His vision reached far beyond the borders of his own 
land, and he was beginning to understand that all 
men are brave and should be brothers. The various 
instrumentalities that brought all peoples severally face 
to face, that promised still further to increase under- 
standing and sympathy and therefore the prospect of 
peace, unhappily and finally had just the opposite effect. 
Men grew in international sympathy; sovereignties 
did not. Men dropped their prejudices; govern- 
ments did not. The rigid barriers which geo- 
graphically delimit nations became more rigid 
and more unyielding as individual knowledge grew and 
common sympathy spread. The light that pene- 
trated to the individual and banished his bigotry 
could not penetrate national barriers as such. Its 
effect indeed was not to banish the darkness, but 
to cast deeper shadows. The condition that made 
men gentle made nations harsh; the impulse that 
drew the peoples of the world together drove 
sovereignties apart. The movement which fore- 
shadowed a democratic world, the brotherhood of 
man, meant the end of the existing international order^ 
and sovereignty instinctively knew and feared that. 
So far as governments would permit, men made 
world-wide rules of action. They traded together 
internationally when tariffs allowed. They joined 
in great co-operative movements where race and 
creed and all the usual distinctions that separate 
men were ignored — ignored because men found when 
they came face to face that the old hates and preju- 



dices were based on lies. The units of humanity 
became homogeneous; the units of civilization, the 
great sovereignties, did not. Here were two irrecon- 
cilable conditions. Sovereignties were in desperate 
straits. Each, menaced by every other, assumed that 
its integrity must be preserved at any cost. None was 
able to change its point of view; none was permitted 
to qualify its attitude toward other sovereignties, 
because each feared, as Shakespeare puts it, that 

''To show less sovereignty than they, must need 
Appear less King-hke." 

No sovereignty except that of Germany saw, fully, 
what this meant. Germany saw it long ago. Sover- 
eignty from the beginning meant ultimate world- 
dominion by some nation. It could mean nothing less. 

This explains why the splendidly efficient machines 
of modern civilization, moving, from the standpoint of 
the individual, co-operatively, happily and helpfully 
under the guidance of powerfully advancing human 
sympathy, were on the first of August, 1914, suddenly 
swerved by the savagery of unregulated internationality 
and sent crashing into each other. How complete the 
ruin of that collision no one can yet tell ! What was 
destroyed, or is to be destroyed, is not yet clear. 
Was it democracy? Or was it sovereignty? The 
ultimate destruction of one or the other is probable. 
World peace is possible under either, but not under both. 

Out of this hideous ruin will sovereignty ulti- 
mately arise rehabilitated and increasingly aggres- 
sive? Will a group of Powers finally emerge substan- 
tially victorious and will the Controlling Power of 
that group by perfectly logical processes gradually 
make its civilization dominant over the whole world? 
That is the only process by which sovereignty can 
ever bring permanent peace. So long as there are 

8 



even two great unconditioned sovereignties in the 
world, there can be no lasting peace. 

Or is it possible that out of the ruin will come 
the revolt of humanity? Will a real Demos appear? 
A Democracy that has no frontiers, the Democracy 
of Humanity ? Remembering not only the slaughter 
of 1914 and 1915, but the program of slaughter fol- 
lowed all through the Christian era, will the people say 
with young Clifford in Henry VI: 

r "Oh War, thou Son of Hell." / 

Is it conceivable that they may say to sover- 
eignty— 

''You have in some things served us well in ages 
passed. You have awakened in us heroic aspira- 
• tions and led us to noble achievements; but now, 
alas ! your hands drip with innocent blood, you 
are guilty of deeds which the beasts of the jungle 
would not commit — deeds that show you to be 
inherently and necessarily, in the present condi- 
tion of the world, the arch enemy of the human 
race, and therefore we must now fundamentally 
modify your demands." 

Milton, in the Sixth Book of Paradise Lost, tells 
how Satan, rebeUious, and all his hosts, after a terrific 
struggle, threw themselves headlong 

"Down from the verge of Heaven." 

He tells us, too, how the Almighty stayed his own 
hand because 

Not to destroy, but root them out of Heaven." 

Flanders and Poland tell a tale of horror, record 
the use of machines and instruments of destruction, 
register a story of cruelty and hate, such as even 
the Miltonic imagination did not compass. The 
Satanic crew now busy in Europe, whether their 
blood guilt is the result of dynastic and race ambi- 

9 



tions or, as I believe, the product of forces beyond their 
control, must in like fashion be cast out if we are 
ever to have peace in this world. 

That process will raise profound issues here. 
The Trans-Atlantic problem includes more than lies 
on the surface. What indeed of democracy? Will 
it again be strangled as it was at the Congress of 
Vienna a century ago, under the leadership of Austria 
and Prince Metternich? We are involved because 
if democracy has a future in Europe, it will largely 
be the result of its triumph here — a condition that 
Metternich and his fellow reactionaries did not have 
to face. 

For a hundred and thirt3^-five years of organized 
life, and indeed through all the years since the settle- 
ment of Jamestown and the landing at Plymouth, 
America has been the beneficiary of the human race. 
Wrapped in her all but impenetrable isolation, beyond 
the reach of dynastic ambition, and until recently 
substantially beyond the impact of other sovereign- 
ties, and therefore measurably unaffected by inter- 
nationality and its savagery, she has taken to her 
bosom the restless, the wronged, the adventurous, 
the bold, the brave — of all lands, indeed she has 
gathered into her fertile soil seed sifted from all the 
world. 

Our country has not been unworthy of the oppor- 
tunity. With all her blundering, she has done well; 
and whether she is now to be branded as selfish after 
all depends on what she clearly stands for when this 
war closes. One great thing she has done — perhaps 
the greatest democratic thing that men have ever 
done. She has shown how so-called sovereign states 
can be merged into a larger state without losing their 
individuaUty and without parting with democratic 
principles. She has shown how local citizenships 

10 



can coalesce into a master citizenship and yet remain 
vital. But, unless we misread the signs of Fate, she 
is now nearing the period when she must do more 
than that, or prove herself recreant, show herself an 
unworthy beneficiary. 

Before considering what we should do in the 
interest of humanity, what we should do to discharge 
our obligation and our duty, let us consider what we 
should do at once, not as a measure of philanthropy 
but as a measure of safety. 

First, we should arm, and arm adequately; not 
because we believe in that theory of government, 
we do not, we hate it ; nor because we believe in that 
method of settling international difficulties, but because 
we must at all hazards protect this home of dem- 
ocracy from the Satanic brood which, driven from 
Heaven, apparently fell in Flanders and Poland. 

Second, we must at the same time try at least to 
show that we are as great as Fate has decreed that 
we may be. 

''But specifically", you ask, "what should we do"? 

We should signify our willingness to meet rep- 
presentatives of all the considerable powers of the 
world in an International Congress, the purpose 
of which shall be similar to that of the Convention 
which met in Philadelphia in 1787. That Convention 
met in the historic mansion where the Declaration 
of Independence was signed. Those two great assem- 
blages, the second no less than the first, have made the 
words ''Independence Hall", in the imagination of 
the plain people of all the world, to shine like the 
Divine Presence over the Mercy Seat. 

We should in that Congress stand for the civil- 
izing and humanizing of international relations by 
whatever steps may be necessary. If to do that the 
present doctrine of unconditioned sovereignty must 

11 



be abandoned, if as a nation we must surrender what 
each Colony seemed to surrender in 1789, we should 
stand for that. We should find when the time came 
— as our fathers did — that we had actually surrendered 
only a httle false pride, a little hate, a little prejudice 
and a little fear, and had entered, as the Colonies did 
upon the onl}^ Order that leads to peace and true 
greatness. 

If such a program were presented to the stricken 
people of Europe at this war's close, it probably 
would not raise any larger problem than Washington 
and Franklin and Madison and Hamilton faced in 
1787. The whole civiHzed world is no larger nor 
more obsessed by prejudice than the Colonies were 
then. You remember how bitterly they hated each 
other. Perhaps you recall what Mr. James Bryce 
says in his ''American Commonwealth," viz : that 
if the people of the Colonies had voted directly 
on the adoption or rejection of the Federal Consti- 
tution, it would not have been adopted. 

You certainly recall that New York State was 
against it, and the Convention called to vote on it 
was hostile until Alexander Hamilton compelled accept- 
ance by the force of his logic and eloquence. We 
narrowly missed reverting to political chaos. 

John Fiske calls the years between the Peace 
of Paris and the adoption of the Federal Constitution 
the critical period of American history. So indeed 
it was. During that period prejudice was put aside, 
jealousies were overcome, hatreds were forgotten, 
and the common aims of the people, their natural 
sympathy, their homogeneity, were gathered up into 
a . triumphant democracy. 

No exact figures are available, but the popu- 
lation of the European states now at war — excluding 
Japan, Turkey, Asiatic Russia, and the Balkans — 

12 



was at the beginning of the nineteenth century ap- 
proximately the same as the population of the United 
States now. Our territory, geographically, is about 
equal to that of the countries I have included. 

At the close of the Napoleonic Wars the people 
of Europe expected a new order and the end of war. 
They looked for the United States of Europe. Met- 
ternich and his associates denied that hope and 
so readjusted continental Europe as to strangle 
democracy. But the dream of the people was borne 
over seas and the United States of America in 1915 
is the colossal fact which damns the continental 
sovereignties of 1815, and points the way to a 
regenerated Europe. 

Emerging from this hopeless, senseless, and des- 
perate struggle, the people of Europe will desire 
democracy as never before. They first brought dem- 
ocracy to us. Shall we now take it back to them? 

We shall not, of course, reach the ultimate goal 
at one bound. A world state modelled after our 
Federal Constitution may be a long way off, but a 
real beginning would be a transcendent achievement. 
Ex-President Taft's League to enforce Peace, with its 
modest suggestion of a modified sovereignty, if achieved 
would be worth centuries of European diplomacy. 

We did not ourselves achieve peace immediately 
after 1789, nor [a national citizenship, but after 
our feet were once fairly set in the way of the Con- 
stitution, the people would not be denied. Once the 
people of Europe feel their feet firmly set upon a 
road that leads away from the savagery which now 
commands them, away from the slaughter which 
periodically claims their sons, from the shame that 
claims their daughters, no dynastic or demogogic 
ambition can indefinitely deny "them the achievement 
of the civic brotherhood which is the glory of America. 

13 



The people of Europe are not essentially different 
from us. They are bone of our bone and flesh of our 
flesh. The difference hes in this : We have been the 
darlings of fortune. We have realized the noble vision 
of democracy which Europe glimpsed and lost a century 
ago. After a hundred j^ears of agon}^, the Fates 
bring again to those stricken peoples conditions not 
dissimilar to those of 1815. 

If now we arm — as we should — and do only that 
we shaU show ourselves a nation of ingrates. If we 
arm and say to Europe that we are ready at any time 
to disarm, ready with them to create an international 
state, a state in which the central authority shall act 
directly on the people as our Federal Government does 
— a state democratically controlled as our Union is — a 
state in which international questions shall be settled 
as our interstate questions are — a state in which war 
would ultimately become as impossible, as unthinkable 
as it now is between Massachusetts and New York — if 
we do that, aye, if we try to do that — we shall show 
ourselves morally at least to be worthy descendants 
of the intrepid men who signed the Declaration of 
1776, worthy successors of the great democrats who 
fashioned the charter of our liberties in 1787. 



14 



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